How many drives will Rock make available over the network?

Roon Software Discussion ROCK
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Hi all,

I know that Rock makes a connected USB drive available to other computers on the same network, i am wondering if there are any limits to this?

I plan to use a USB hub and connect 6-8 drives to my NUC, will all of these show up as available on the network?

Also what kind of speeds are people seeing when writing and reading to the drives when accessed over the network?

Thanks

Ricky

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From ROCK: Importing Music:

Method #2: Importing To Network Folder

ROCK exposes a network share on your network using SMB, just like a NAS. By accessing this share, you can copy files directly to ROCK.

In this share is a folder called Storage , and inside that are all your drives (USB or internal storage) connected to the ROCK machine.

In a gigabit network you can expect around 110 MB/s. For USB 2.0 you can expect around 25 - 35 MB/s, USB 3.X can exceed the gigabit network speed.
You have to read the specification sheet of your drives to find out what speeds (read/write) they achieve. In the end, the slowest achievable speed of any of the involved devices wins.

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In this share is a folder called Storage , and inside that are all your drives (USB or internal storage) connected to the ROCK machine.

So whats the limit? Anybody know? @support

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If it’s like everything else in the binary (hexadecimal) world then I’m guessing 256.

:laughing:

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Or maybe only 127 or 32 or 18 per individual controller.

The USB standard supports up to 127 devices, and USB hubs are a part of the standard.

Many modern USB 3.0 hosts use Intel XHCI USB controllers, which impose their own limit on the total number of endpoints to 96. This means that the maximum number of devices able to be attached to an Intel XHCI host controller - or an XHCI-based host system - is actually 96 endpoints / 3 endpoints per device = 32 devices.

If we use 8-port USB 3.0 hubs to connect devices to our host machine, this means that you could attach 18 total devices:

HUB #1 (1 hubs * 6 devices / hub) + 8 attached devices = 14 devices +
HUB #2 (1 hubs * 6 devices / hub) + 8 attached devices = 14 devices +
HUB #3 (1 hubs * 6 devices / hub) + 2 attached devices = 8 devices
= 32 total devices for XHCI

But what has this to do with Roon? Roon might not limit the number of watched folders, but the burden of watching that many might make the core unstable.

On the other side, if one needs a NAS, one should use a NAS and not trying to abuse a Nucleus/ROCK installation for this purpose. Having just one share that provides storage of many storage devices together might quickly become cumbersome and impractical to use.

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Who said anything about abusing Roon for that purpose ?

You are acting like connecting multiple drives to a Rock and then having the flexibility to add music to them over the network is a big ask.

1 Like
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Hi @Ricky_Tipper - I think that bit of info could be rather important:

Since Rock will expose all the drives as one (1) shared folder, you will - for instance - not see the storage used per drive but the sum of all the drives together. So you would need other means to control how much space is used / available. If that’s an issue for your planned usage I don’t know.

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Mmm, that’s very interesting.

If that’s the case, how would I choose what drive the music is added too?

Also, I would be looking to back up each drive over the network to locally attached USB storage or my NAS.

How would I go about this ?

Thanks

Ricky

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You’ll see sub-folders which are named after the drives (with some ID added). That’s not a problem.

You would have to do this via the client machine you use to copy music to the drives or directly from the NAS - which should see the ROCK Storage share as well.

Or you unplug the drives temporarily from the ROCK machine and attach 'em directly to another machine and do the backup from there. Not very convenient, I guess.

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